The first round of the Draft can be exciting. I wasn't glued to it by any means. Ended up watching it in a bar between a wedding and a reception. Just enough to get my fix. My favorite part of the sport is watching the guys go through college and enter the NFL. Wish I could say the same for NCAA basketball but those guys are one and done if they don't decide just to go make some cash in Europe for a year.

Sorry, but here goes another long posting on housing... hope it's at least thought-provoking to someone.

I think high density as the primary or sole goal in approving new residential development is obsolete. A newer and more meaningful goal for the 2010 decade is energy efficiency.

This can be subject to many definitions but in the Johnson St. case I would focus on efficiency of transit and efficient use of energy within the homes.

Efficiency of transit means building residences near workplaces, schools, public transportation and bike paths. The Johnson St. location scores well on these measures, though it is not within convenient walking distance of a high school. For reasons of efficiency of location, then, I would argue this is a good site for a relatively high number of residential units, not just a few replacements of existing stock.

The household energy efficiency issue is more complex but a starting place would be comparing the expense and feasibility of making the existing structures efficient versus new construction. Single family detached housing is generally the most expensive and least efficient, and one big reason is the detached-home owner has to insulate on six sides (north, south, east, and west plus basement and attic). Attached housing logically has fewer sides to be insulated.

And though older "six-sided" buildings can sometimes be insulated and made acceptably energy-efficient, gutting and retrofitting is frequently more costly than building new. In addition, poorly-done retrofits can bring with them moisture problems and other deterioration, and aren't a slam-dunk DIY project for a first-time homeowner.

Many other higher efficiencies of attached new housing units can be demonstrated: efficiencies of certain materials, construction expense, and heating and cooling mechanicals come to mind first.

On the other hand, tearing down existing structures does result in landfilling debris. At some future time we will recycle nearly all the wood in a building and find secondary markets for much of the other debris, but we are not yet at this point. So there's a tradeoff to tearing down even the most decrepit old building, though some of the former Kozak houses along Johnson St. qualify as extremely decrepit.

Nonetheless, since Madison has many desirable detached single family residences already I believe that to build more, especially on prime downtown land, makes little sense.

Bush, Cheney, and their ilk should be drawn and quartered for their torture programs, but it will never happen. As congressional leaders deplore torture at Abu Ghraib, the house quietly renews appropriations that keep open the United State's most infamous torture teaching institution, the School of the Americas, or whatever it is called these days. Graduates are the shock troops of political repression, propping up dictorial and repressive regimes. This stuff crosses party lines, and goes up to and includes people like V.P. Biden, who to his credit wrote a law in the 90's (Biden-Thurmond Justice Improvements Act) implementing the United States committment against torture, but later was silent and left a law he wrote unenforced during the Abu Ghraib atrocities. The Dems gutless compliance during this time period of torture and the Patriot Act has ruined them for me.

I used to do lots of live gigs. A Friday or Saturday night off was RARE thing, plus I had weeknight gigs and daytime gigs. So far this year I've been on stage 5 times.

When it comes to CDs, I used to get paid sessions every few months. The last time I laid tracks for a CD was last summer.

Part of the reason I'm doing less live gigs is because I moved to Madison where there is much less paid work than there was back home, but I'm told that there's is a lot less paid work there than there used to be - some say less than ever. Even when my calendar was full, I knew I was one of the lucky ones. Let's face it, a DJ or a solo act is one guy to pay instead of a bunch of guys (a band) to pay. Plus with internet juke-boxes that can download almost any song most people can think of, and iPods that easily plug into a sound system, a lot more places are thinking twice before shelling out $400.00 or better for a band.

The reason I'm not doing CD tracks is directly related to it being harder to make any money from them - less profit means smaller budgets. Several people I know are opting for live recordings or digging unre-leased stuff and even old demos out of the archives instead of mounting (and paying for) studio projects.

What I've been up to is jingle work. The Boss Lady emails me the specs, I do up a rough or two for her to approve and email her an mp3, she approves or asks for changes, when its done I email her a wav, and she puts money in my account. It's boring, unchallenging, and uninteresting, not at all why I became a musician, but it pays the bills.

Hopefully last summer was atypical, but high fuel prices meant that Schoeps scrambled to get deliveries/picks up at reasonable and scheduled times. Some drivers would show up at 6a or 11p and say I'm here whether they were expected at that time or not. The situation caused a stir among immediate neighbors on Division St who complained about trucks idling for hours at a time waiting to pick up/unload. One person called me during a delivery and I couldn't hear a word he said -point taken- and I held a meeting with neighbors and Schoeps. Schoeps was very attentive.

Overall, between Schoeps and Jenifer St Market, there is a lot of truck traffic and related noise during the day if you are in the immediate vicinity.